This biography the world knows by heart. It does not esteem the boy William Shakespeare the less because he was a boy--because--in the age and period reserved for that crop--he sowed and garnered his "wild oats." It has reason to believe him to have been much more than a mere wayward youth. Aubrey ("old Aubrey," "arch-gossip Aubrey," the Shakespeareans call him, probably because he wrote his sketch fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prodigy, that "he exercised his father's trade--but, when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there anything in the record of his mature and latter years--of his investments in tithes, and messuages, and homesteads--of his foreclosures and suits for money loaned and malt delivered--of his begetting children and dying; leaving--still with finical detail and nice and exact economy--an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he tenderly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the {048}mother of his children--any thing at which the world should sneer. If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of it. Besides such contracts and business papers as he must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his name to nothing except a declaration of debt against a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This is his own business, and who has any thing to say? But, when our biographers go a step further and demand that we shall accept this as the record of a demigod; of the creator of a "Hamlet" and an "Othello;" and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to London--worked himself up (as he must have worked himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in that business and calling earned money and kept it--as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the "Hamlet," the ".Julius Cæsar," the "Othello," and all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean drama--some of us have been heard to demur! The scholar's dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by age, with these records, which are as authentic and beyond question as the internal evidence itself. And, once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the dilemma of the whole world. Let any one try to conceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employment to-day--when the theater is at its best, and half the world play-goers--precarious for capital and industry; but in those days an experiment, in every {049}sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in